7/26/2010 @ 1:45PM

Automotive Terms You Need To Know

The 2011 Bentley Continental Supersports goes from zero to 60 in 3.7 seconds. It has 621 bhp and 590 foot-pounds of torque from a 6-liter, direct-injection engine. You can get it painted black, with smoked-steel 10-spoke bladed rims–and you could easily murder it out after it leaves the showroom.

Now–do you know what you just read? What does “bhp” mean? Is “murdering out” as illegal as it sounds? On the off-chance that you don’t know, we’ve compiled this list of automotive terms any car owner should understand.

Let’s start with the basics: Bhp stands for brake horsepower, the measurement of a car’s horsepower when it comes straight out of the crankshaft. It’s measured using a friction brake (dynamometer) attached to the drive shaft.

Torque is twisting force (the force you feel when a car accelerates) measured by foot-pounds (the distance a one-foot crank can push one pound in a circular motion). A six-liter, direct-injected engine is a big gasoline engine that allows a particular volume (six liters, in this case) of air/fuel displacement. It works by forcing fuel directly into the combustion chamber of each cylinder to mix air and gas simultaneously at the point of combustion, rather than mixing air and gas in a separate chamber like more conventional engines. The process improves fuel efficiency while increasing power.

Murdering it out? That’s just the cool way to say a car is all black–no chrome, no shine, nothing.

Simple Things Matter

With 255 million drivers in the U.S., there are more cars on the road than ever before. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 11.5 million cars will be sold in the U.S. this year, up 1.5 million from 2009. But according to racing pro Johnny Unser, most drivers don’t even understand which types of tires they should be using. For instance, there’s a distinct difference between summer tires and all-season tire, sand many people don’t get it, he says.

“A lot of people don’t correctly choose what tires should be on their car,” says Unser, who drove the 24 Hours of Daytona car race eight times and finished second in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. “Are you going to have a summer tire and then a set of wheels that you can put your snow tires on? The summer ones are typically really good in the rain–you’re taking the purpose and you’re really narrowing it down, so they’re really good at what they do. The same thing goes for a winter tire.”

Tires aren’t the only things overlooked by the average commuter. Lori Johnson, a longtime auto mechanic, teaches car-owners the basics at Ladies Start Your Engines. Johnson says some of the terms most commonly misunderstood by her students the most important: Decarbonization (periodically removing carbon from an engine’s fuel injectors) and performing a coolant flush (a procedure to drain all existing fluid) help keep cars running smoothly and safely. (She suggests flushes every 30,000 miles or two years, whichever comes first.)

Several of the terms on our list are more colloquial than technical. A deuce, for instance, refers to a 1932 Ford coupe–the car made popular when it appeared on the cover of the Beach Boys’ 1963 album, Little Deuce Coupe, and in the catchy tune of the same name.

A hoopty is any car that deserves to be junked–perhaps you’ve heard the lyric “My hoopty rollin’, tailpipe draggin’, heat don’t work an’ my girl keeps naggin’,” by the rap artist Sir Mix-a-Lot? A “Spyder”–not to be confused with spiders or Spykers–is just another name for a convertible. And the moniker “997″ refers to
Porsche’s
internal name for its iconic 911 coupe. The name is derived from Porsche’s old numbering system, which numbered every project the company undertook, starting with the number seven.

So how do terms like this find their way into mainstream use? “The guys in the Porsche clubs just like to use it because it shows they’re in-the-know,” says Porsche spokesman Dave Engelman. “It means you’re an insider.”